What is a Compact Disc

A Compact Disk (CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data. It can be ported from one place to another and is round medium made up of molded polymer. The data is recorded electronically; originally the compact disk was developed for storing digital audio. It is also used for the purpose of storing video, text, and other digital form. The compact disks replaced the phonograph record which was used to playing back music. It consists of one or more metal layers on which the data is stored. The most prevalent compact disks are used by the music industry to store digital recordings and CD-ROMs (compact disk- read only memory) are used to store computer data.

Compact disks are still the standard physical medium for commercial audio recordings and are used widely in cars and other portable playback devices. The CD-R which is known as compact disk recorder is a type of compact disk which is used to store or write the data only once. It is a write once recordable compact disk media that is suitable for creating audio or data CD compilations. While a CD-RW (Compact Disk re-writable) disc, can be erased and written again and again. Many CD players and other equipment’s generally perform better with compact disk recorder media. It is always mentioned on the CD player that which type of formats it supports.

Compact Disc – interactive (CD – i) is the multimedia CD format which was specified in 1986. CD-i was specified as an entire system which not only comprised of a disc and data format, but also a hardware and software system. It also contains a variety of special compression methods for audio and visual data. These interactive players are easier to use, and have TV video output as well. In a computer system, the CD-ROMs are used to run the compact disks. These are popularly used to distribute computer software, including games and multimedia applications, though any data can be stored as per the capacity of the disk. Some CDs hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while some CDs have data, such as software or digital video, which is only usable on a computer. These type of CDs are called enhanced CDs.